Greetings from sunny London where here, in deepest Knightsbridge, we are not yet doing what we, or rather she, 'should' be doing, which is emptying the bathroom of its' contents. Oh no, we have been having much more fun in the yumyum HQ!
That fun has involved eating hard boiled eggs, drinking delicious coffee and stripping meat from those turkey necks I wrote about in the last post. Out of interest, she did a search on-line about turkey neck soup and up came all manner of ways of cooking them, none of which were like what she does.
So I decided that as ours is truly scrummydumptious and dead easy, I would ask her to share it with you.
Now, first up is to find the turkey necks! For a start, you will not find them in a supermarket, no mattter how 'SUPER' it is, they will not be there! Secondly, if you buy your meat from a supermarket, shame upon you! For it is these evil companies who have driven many a meat and or milk farmer to commit suicide let alone bankruptcy.
Go and find a butcher.. a proper butcher who knows his cuts of meat and can 'bone out' properly. Frequent them and get and take their advice, ask them for their 'specials', take your seasonings to them and ask them to make you some sausages, you can then freeze them and have delicious things to eat with no additives.
She frequents two butchers and you know their names if you read this blog regularly. Dickinsons in the North End Road, in Fulham are our local butcher and then up on Central Parade in Streatham is Bartek Express, aka the suppliers of IshPol.
She gets our turkey necks from Bartek. She has never seen them in Dickinsons, they do sell trays of chicken, lamb, pork and beef bones for a £1.00 but she has never seen turkey necks for sale and rather thinks that they are taken home (very fast) by the staff!
Our yumyum HQ is minute but high up on top of a wall unit is just enough space for two stock pots, one gigantic one and one medium sized one. Up she went and down she came with the medium one.
It was given a good scrub with boiling water from the kettle, remember the flippin' boiler blinked' so there's none from a tap, and into the pot went the turkey necks together with home grown garlic, carrots, celariac, a leek, a hamburg parsley and seasoning.
After it had come to the boil, the heat was turned way down and it simmered for 20 minutes. Then it was turned off and it sat over-night with the lid on.
We 'Rised and shined' this morning at some disgracefully late hour after.. teehee.. cuddles in bed with my mum playing silly games under the covers. One cannot be serious all the time and it, life, has been a 'bit' too serious around here for a long while.
Why? Well, what with the cost of the solicitors aka lawyer's bill, the bill for the restoration of the rug and the cost of my three week sojourn in jail, her budget was pared to the bone and nothing, in the way of money, has been spent that was not absolutely vital.
Back to the those turkey necks! More hot water from the kettle into a bowl, she scrubbed her nails with soap and a nail brush and set about the necks. Yes, you take the meat off fiddly neck bones with your thumb and finger nails, you could do it with a knife but it would take forever and you'd get very frustrated doing it like that, so why drive yourself nuts?
The cold meat slipped off the bones easily into a bowl, the bones went back into the stock, she then put the meat, which by the way was all brown meat and no fat, into a tub and weighed it, the tub she knew weighed 20g. She had 578g of meat in the tub, that meant there was 558g of pure meat! Tub went into the chilly white larder.
After adding more root vegetables and seasoning to the stock, she brought it up to boil, it is now simmering on the stove and will do so for about four hours. The vegetables will add flavour and the neck bones will release their goodness.
I don't have to be anxious, I know my mum and I saw a couple of the neck vertibrae didn't go back into the stockpot, I'll 'find' them at some point today and what a cruncy treat they'll be!
Yes, of course, most of us avian folk aka birds are carnivores, why are you surprised? Do you honestly think Mr. Robin Red Breast is taking that Centipede back to the nest to use as a tape measure! Or that Mr. Thrush is playing the cymbals whilst he bashes Mr. Snail on a rock?
I am off! My swimming pool is calling me to go and play 'Splish & Splosh' and she, the poor dear, has to get it together and empty the bathroom of everything today.. because all though Richard and his motley crew aren't arriving until Wednesday morning, she is gardening tomorrow and doing something with an old friend on Tuesday.
And she is a fully paid-up member of the 'Do It Now' school (in this case slightly later today) for if you do it now, then you know it is done and you don't get into a panic at the last minute. Plus, you'll know where you put everything. Which reminds me, she has to put the old lock back into the bedroom door with those longer screws she found.
Back momentarily to the stock.. after being simmered, she'll strain the stock, pick out the bones and puree the vegetables which get added back to the liquid. Some will be chilled and then frozen, but a big bowl, with some of the meat added to it, will be her supper tonight.
She has an all-day jaunt planned for next Saturday and I already know what her lunch will be. Can you guess? It involves her old trusty Thermos flask (for food), you got it, she'll be slurping thick vegetable and turkey potage with a couple of savoury linseed flapjacks.. about which I will write soon, they're our latest best-thing-ever and made in Sussex.
So it's PipPip from us both but before we go, I have to say "Welcome home Nikki, we wish you, Bob and Karen a very happy life, remember to play nice, they've never had a German Shepherd before!"
GeeGee Parrot.
October 2nd, 2016.
